An address delivered at the request of a committee of the citizens of Washington : on the occasion of reading the Declaration of Independence, on the fourth of July, 1821

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DELIVEREl)

At the request of a Comvfiittee of the Citizens of Washington ;

ON THE OCCASION OE READING

(/^-■(JL. C^"*'

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE,

fOURTH OF JULYj 182L

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JOHN QUINCY ADAMS.

CITY OF WASHINGTON :
i'RiNTED BY DAVIS AND FORCE, PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE.

1821,

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Washington, July 4, 1821,
SIR:

The Committee of Arrangements for the celebration of this
day, in presenting to you their unfeigned thanks for the
patriotic and able Address which you have obliged them
by delivering, solicit the favor of you to furnish them with a
copy of it, for publication in a form suited to its merits.

J. P. VAN NESS,
FONTAINE MAURY,
JOSEPH GALES, Jr.
JAMES M. VARNUM,
ARCH. HENDERSON.
Hon. J. Q,. Adams.

To the CoDimitt''e of Arransrements for the
Celebration of the Anniveisaiy of Inde-
pendence at the City of Washington.

Washington, 5 July, 1821.
Gentlemen :

In placing at your disposal a copy of the Address
yesterday delivered in compliance with your invitation, I avail
myself of the occasion of expressing through you, to my Fel-
low-Citizens, the assurance of my gratitude for the indulgence
with which it was received.

I have the honor to be,

With great respect. Gentlemen,

Your very obedient servant,

JOHN qUINCY ADAMS.

Fellow-Citizens :

Until within a few days preceding that
which we have again assembled to commemorate, our
Fathers, the people of this Union, had constituted a
portion of the British nation ; a nation renowned in Arts
and Arms, who, from a small Island in the Atlantic Ocean,
had extended their dominion over considerable parts of
every quarter of the Globe. Governed themselves by a
race of kings, whose title to sovereignty had originally
been founded in conquest, spell-bound for a succession of
ages under that portentous system of despotism and of
superstition which in the name of the meek and humble
Jesus had been spread over the Christian world, the his-
tory of this nation had, for a period of seven hundred
years, from the days of the conquest till our own, exhib-
ited a conflict almost continual, between the oppressions
of power and the claims of right. In the theories of the
Crown and the Mitre man had no rights. Neither the
body nor the soul of the individual was his own. From
the impenetrable gloom of this intellectual darkness, and
the deep degradation of this servitude, the British na^
tion had partially emerged. The martyrs of religious
freedom had consumed to ashes at the stake : the cham-
pions of temporal liberty had bowed their heads upon
the scaffold 5 and the spirits of many a bloody day had
left their earthly vesture upon the field of battle, and soar-
ed to plead the cause of Liberty before the throne of
Heaven. The people of Britain, through long ages of
civil war, had extorted from their tyrants not acknow-
ledgements, but grants, of right. With this concession

they had been content to stop in the progress of human
improvement. They received their freedom as a dona-
tion from their sovereigns ; they appealed for their pri-
vileges to a sign manual and a seal ; they held their title
to liberty, like their title to lands, from the bounty of a
man ; and in their moral and political chronology, the
great charter of Runny Mead was the beginning of the
world.

From the earliest ages of their recorded history, the
inhabitants of the British Islands have been distinguished
for their intelligence and their spirit. How much of these
two qualities, the fountains of all amelioration in the
condition of men, was stifled by these two principles of
subserviency to ecclesiastical usurpation, and of holding
rights as the donation of kings, this is not the occasion
to inquire.

Of their tendency to palsy the vigor and enervate the
facidties of man, all philosophical reasoning, and all ac-
tual experience, concur in testimony.

These principles, however, were not peculiar to the
people of Britain. They were the delusions of all Eu-
rope, still the most enlightened and most improvable por-
tion of the earth. The temporal chain was riveted up-
on the people of Britain by the conquest. Their spirit-
ual fetters were forged by subtlety working upon super-
stition. Baneful as the effect of these principles was, they
could not for ever extinguish the light of reason in the
human mind. The discovery of the Mariner's Compass
was soon followed by the extension of intercourse be-
tween nations the most distant, and which, without that
hght beaming in darkness to guide the path of man over
the boundless waste of waters, could never have been
known to each other. The invention of Printing, and the
composition of Gunpowder, which revolutionized at once
the art and science of war, and the relations of peace ;

the revelation of India to Vasco de Gama ; and the dis-
closure to Columbus of the American hemisphere, all re-
sulted from the incompressible energies of the human in-
tellect, bound and crippled as it was by the double cords
of ecclesiastical imposture and political oppression. To
these powerful agents in the progressive improvement of
our species, Britain can lay no claim. For them the
children of men are indebted to Italy, to Germany, to
Portugal, and to Spain, All these improvements, how-
ever, consisted in successful researches into the proper-
ties and modifications of external nature. The religious
reformation was an improvement in the science of mind ;
an improvement in the intercourse of man with his Cre-
ator, and in his acquaintance with himself. It was an
advance in the knowlege of his duties and his rights. It
was a step in the progress of man in comparison with
which the Magnet and Gunpowder, the wonders of either
India ; nay, the Printing Press itself, were but the paces
of a pigmy to the stride of a giant. If to this step of
human advancement Germany likewise lays claim in the
person of Martin Luther, or in the earlier but ineffectu-
al martyrdom of John Huss, England may point to hex
Wicliffe as a yet more primitive vindicator of the same
righteous cause, and may insist on the glory of having
contributed her share to the improvement of the moral
condition of man.

The corruptions and usurpations of the Church were
the immediate objects of these reformers ; but, at the
foundation of all their exertions, there was a single, plain,
and almost self-evident principle — that man has a right to
the exercise of his own reason. It was this principle
which the sophistry and rapacity of the Church had ob-
scured and obliterated, and which the intestine divisions
of the same Church itself first restored. The triumph of
reason was the result of inquiry and discussion. Centu-

4"ies of desolating wars have succeeded, and oceans af
human blood have flowed for the final establishment of
this principle ; but it was from the darkness of the Clois-
ter that the first spark was emitted, and from the arches
of an University that it first kindled into day. From
the discussion of religious rights and duties, the transi-
tion to that of the political and civil relations of men
with one another, was natural and unavoidable ; in both,
the reformers were met by the weapons of temporal pow-
er. At the same glance of reason, the tiara would have
fallen from the brow of priesthood, and the despotic scep-
tre would have departed from the hand of royalty, but
for the sword by which they were protected — that sword
which, like the flaming sword of the Cherubim, turned
every way to debar access to the tree of life.

The double contest against the oppressors of the Church
and State was too appalling for the vigor, or too compre-
hensive for the faculties of the reformers of the European
Continent. In Britain alone was it undertaken, and in
Britain but partially succeeded.

It was in the midst of that fermentation of the human
intellect which brought right and power in direct and
deadly conflict with each other, that the rival crowns of
the two portions of the British Island, were united on
the same head. It was then that, released from the ma-
nacles of ecclesiastical domination, the minds of men be-
gan to investigate the foundations of civil government.
But the mass of the nation surveyed the fabric of their
institutions as it existed in fact. It had been founded in
conquest ; it had been cemented in servitude, and so broken
and moulded had been the minds of this brave and intel-
ligent people to their actual condition, that instead of
solving civil society into its first elements in search of
their rights, they looked back only to conquest as the

origin of their liberties, and claimed their rights but as
donations from their kings.

This faltering assertion of freedom is not chargeable
indeed upon the whole nation. There were spirits ca-
pable of tracing civil government to its foundation in
the moral and physical nature of man ; but conquest and
servitude were so mingled up in every particle of the so-
cial existence of the nation, that they had become vital-
ly necessary to them, as a portion of the fluid, itself des-
tructive of life, is indispensably blended with the atmos-
phere in which we live.

Fellow-Citizens, it was in the heat of this war of moral
elements, which brought one Stuart to the block, and
hurled another from his throne, that our forefathers sought
refuge from its fury, in the then wilderness of this Wes-
tern World.

They were willing exiles from a country dearer to them
than life. — But they were the exiles of liberty and of con-
science, dearer to them even than their country. They
cam,e too with Charters from their kings : for even in
removing to another hemisphere, they " cast longing, lin-
gering, looks behind," and were anxiously desirous of re-
taining ties of connexion with their country, which, in
the solemn compact of a charter, they hoped by the cor-
responding links of allegiance and protection to pre-
serve.

But to their sense of right, the charter was only the
ligament between them, their country, and their king.
Transported to a new world, they had relations with one
another, and relations with the aboriginal inhabitants of
the country to which they came, for which no royal
charter could provide. The tirst settlers of the Ply-
mouth colony, at the eve of landing from their ship,
therefore, bound themselves together by a written co-
venant; and, immediately after landing, purchased from
the Indian natives the right of settlement upon the soil.

10

Thus was a social compact formed upon the elementa-
ry principles of civil sociely, in which conquest and
servitude had no part. The slough of brutal force was
entirely cast off: all was voluntary ; all was unbiassed
consent; all was the agreement of soul with soul.

Other colonies were successively founded, and other
charters granted, until, in the compass of a century and
a half, thirteen distinct British Provinces peopled the
Atlantic shores of the North American continent with
two millions of freemen ; possessing by their charters
the rights of British Subjects, and nurtured by their po-
sition and education, in the more comprehensive and
oi'iginal doctrines of human rights. From their infancy
they had been treated by the parent state with neglect,
harshness, and injustice. Their charters had often been
disregarded and violated ; their commerce restricted and
shackled; their interests wantonly or spitefully sacri-
iiced; so that the hand of the parent had been scarcely
ever felt, but in the alternate application of whips and
scorpions.

When in spite of all these persecutions, by the natural
vigor of their constitution, they were just attaining the
maturity of political manhood, a British Parliament, in
contempt of the clearest maxims of natural equity, in
defiance of the fundamental principle upon which British
freedom itself had been cemented with British blood ;
on the naked unblushing allegation of absolute and un-
controllable power, undertook by their act, to levy, with-
out representation and without consent, taxes upon the
people of America, for the benetit of the people of
Britain. This enormous project of public robbery was
no sooner made known, than it excited throughout the
colonies one general burst of indignant resistance. It
was abandoned, reasserted and resumed, until fleets and
armies were transported, to record in "the characters of

11

fire, famine, and desolation, the transatlantic wisdom of
British legislation, and the tender mercies of British con-
sanguinity.

Fellow-citizens, I am speaking of days long past.
Ever faithful to the sentiment proclaimed in the paper*
which I am about to present once more to your memory
of the past and to your forecast of the future ; you will
hold the people of Britain, as you hold the rest of man-
kind, Enemies in war; in peace Friends. The conflict
for Independence is now itself but a record of history.
The resentments of that age may be buried in oblivion.
The stoutest hearts which then supported the tug of war
are cold under the clod of the valley. My purpose is to
rekindle no angry passion from its embers : but this an-
nual solemn perusal of the instrument which proclaimed
to the world the causes of your existence as a nation, is
not without its just and useful purpose.

It is not by the yearly reiteration of the wrongs en-
dured by your fathers, to evoke from the Sepulchre of
Time, the shades of departed Tyranny ; it is not to draw
from their dread abode the frailties of an unfortunate
monarch who now sleeps withhis fathers, and the suiferings
of whose latter days may have atoned at the bar of Di-
Tine Mercy, for the sins which the accusing Angel will
read from this scroll to his charge ; it is not to exult in
the great moral triumph by which the Supreme Governor
of the world crowned the cause of your country with
success. No, the purpose for which you listen with re-
newed and never-languishing delight to the reading of
this paper is of a purer and more exalted cast. It is
sullied with no vindictive recollection. It is degraded
by no rankling resentment. It is inflated with no vain
and idle exultation of victory. The Declaration of In-
dependence in its primary purport was merely an oc~

* The Declaration of Independence ; read, on this occasion, from the
m-igiiialf which is in the office of the Department of State.

12

casional state paper. It was a solemn exposition to the
World, of the causes which had compelled the people of
a small portion of the British empire to cast off the al-
legiance and renounce the protection of the British
king ; and to dissolve their social connexion with the
British people. In the annals of the human race, the
separation of one people into two, is an event of no un-
common occurrence. The successful resistance of a
people against oppression, to the downfall of the tyrant
and of tyranny itself, is the lesson of many an age, and
of almost every clime. It lives in the venerable records
of Holy Writ. It beams in the brightest pages of profane
history. The names of Pharaoh and Moses, of Tarquin
and Junius Brutus, of Geisler and Tell, of Christiern
and Gustavus Vasa, of Philip of Austria and William of
Orange, stand in long array through the visto of Time,
like the Spirit of Evil and the Spirit of Good, in embat-
tled opposition to each other, from the mouldering ages
of antiquity, to the recent memory of our fathers, and
from the burning plains of Palestine, to the polar frost of
Scandinavia. For the Independence of North America,
there were ample and sutHcent causes in the laws of
moral and physical nature. The tie of colonial subjec-
tion, is compatible with the essential purposes of civil
government, only when the condition of the subordinate
state is from its weakness incompetent to its own pro-
tection. Is the greatest moral purpose of civil govern-
ment the administration of justice ? And if justice has
been truly defined the constant and perpetual will of secu-
ring to every one his right, how absurd and impracticable
is that form of polity, in which the dispenser of justice
is in one quarter of the globe, and he to whom justice
is to be dispensed is in another; where "moons revolve
and oceans roll between the order and its execution ;"
where time and space must be annihilated to secure to

13

every one his right. The tie of colonial subjection may
suit the relations between a great naval power, and the
settlers of a small and remote Island in the incipient
stages of society : but was it possible for British inteU
ligence to imagine, or British sense of justice to desire,
that through the boundless ages of time, the swarming
myriads of freemen, who were to civilize the wilderness,
and fill with human life the solitudes of this immense
continent, should receive the mandates of their earthly
destinies from a council chamber at St. James's, or bow
forever in submission to the omnipotence of St. Ste-
phen's Chapel? Are the essential purposes of civil gov-
ernment, to administer to the wants, and to fortify the
infirmities of solitary man? To unite the sinews of num-
berless arms, and combine the councils of multitudes of
minds, for the promotion of the well-being of all ? The
first moral element then of this composition is sympathy
between the members of which it consists ; the second
is sympathy between the giver and the receiver of the
Law. The sympathies of men begin with the afiections
of domestic life. They are rooted in the natural rela-
tions of husband and wife, of parent and child, of brother
and sister; thence they spread through the social and
moral propinquities of the neighbor and friend, to the
broader and more complicated relations of countryman
and fellow-citizen ; terminating only with the circum-
ference of the globe which we inhabit, in the co-exten-
sive charities incident to the common nature of man.
To each of these relations, different degrees of sympathy
are allotted by the ordinances of nature. The sympa-
thies of domestic hfe are not more sacred and obligato-
ry, but closer and more powerful, than those of neigh-
borhood and friendship. The tie which binds us to our
country, is not more holy in the sight of God, but it is
more deeply seated in our nature, more tender and en-

14

bearing, than that looser link which merely connects us
with our fellow mortal man.

It is a common Government that constitutes our
Country. But in that association, all the sympathies
of domestic life and kindred blood, all the moral liga-
tures of friendship and of neighborhood, are combined
with that instinctive and mysterious connexion between
man and physical nature, which binds the first percep-
tions of childhood in a chain of sympathy with the last
gasp of expiring age, to the spot of our nativity, and the
natural objects by which it is surrounded. These sym-
pathies belong and are indispensable to the relations or-
dained by nature between the individual and his country.
They dwell in the memory and are indelible in the
hearts of the first settlers of a distant colony. These
are the feelings under which the Children of Israel " sat
down by the rivers of Babylon, and wept when they re-
membered Zion." These are the sympathies under
which they "hung their harps upon the willows," and
instead of songs of mirth, exclaimed, " If I forget thee,
O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning."
But these sympathies can never exist for a country,
which v/e have never seen. They are transferred in
the breasts of the succeeding generations, from the
country of human institution, to the country of their
birth ; from the land of which they have only heard, to
the land where their eyes first opened to the day. The
ties of neighborhood are broken up, those of friendship
can never be formed, with an intervening ocean ; and
the natural ties of domestic life, the all-subduing sympa-
thies of love, the indissoluble bonds of marriage, the
heart-riveted kindliness of consanguinity, gradually wi-
ther and perish in the lapse of a few generations. All
the elements which form the basis of that sympathy be-
tween the individual and his country are dissolved. —
Long before the Declaration of Independence the great

15

mass of the People of America and of the People of
Britain, had become total strangers to each other. The
people of America were known to the people of Britain
onlj by the transactions of trade ; by shipments of lum-
ber and flaxseed, indigo and tobacco. They were
known to the government only by half a dozen colonial
agents, humble, and often spurned suitors at the feet of
power, and by royal governors, minions of patronage,
sent, from the footstool of a throne beyond the seas, to
rule a people of whom they knew nothing; as if an in-
habitant of the moon should descend to give laws to the
dwellers upon earth. Here and there, a man of letters
and a statesman, conversant with all history, knew
something of the colonies, as he knew something of Co-
chin-China and Japan. Yet even the prime minister of
England, urging upon his omnipotent Parliament laws
for grinding the colonies to submission, could talk, with-
out amazing or diverting his hearers, of the Island of
Virginia : even Edmund Burke, a man of more ethereal
mind, apologizing to the people of Bristol for the offence
of s\mpathizing with the distresses of our country, rava-
ged by the fire and sword of Britons, asked indulgence
for his feelings on the score of general humanit}^ and
expressly declared that the Americans were a nation ut-
ter strangers to him, and among w4iom he was not sure of
having a single acquaintance. The sympathies there-
fore most essential to the communion of country were,
between the British and American people, extinct.—
Those most indispensable to the just relation between
sovereign and subject, had never existed and could not
exist between the British Government and the American
People. The connexion was unnatural ; and it was iu
the moral order, no less than in the positive decrees,
of Providence, that it should be dissolved.

Yet, Fellow-Citizens, these are not the causes of the

16

separation assigned in the paper which I am about to
read. The connexion between different portions of the
same people, and between a people and their govern-
ment, is a connexion of duties as well as of rights. In
the long conflict of twelve years which had preceded and
led to the Declaration of Independence, our fathers had
been not less faithful to their duties, than tenacious of
their rights. Their resistance had not been rebelhon.
It was not a restive and ungovernable spirit of ambition
bursting from the bonds of colonial subjection, it was the
deep and wounded sense of successive wrongs, upon
which complaint had been only answered by aggravation,
and petition repelled with contumely, which had driven
them to their last stand upon the adamantine rock of
human rights.

It was then, fifteen months after the blood of Lexing-
ton and Bunker's Hill, after Charlestown and Falmouth,
fired by British hands, were but heaps of ashes, after
the ear of the adder had been turned to two successive
supplications to the throne ; after two successive ap-
peals to the people of Britain, as Friends, Countrymeji,
and Brethren, to which no responsive voice of sympa-
thetic tenderness had been returned —

"Nought but the noise of drums and timbrels loud,
*' Their children's cries unheard that passed thro' fire
" To the grim idol,"

Then it was, that the Thirteen United Colonies of North
America, by their delegates in Congress assembled, ex-
ercising the first act of sovereignty by right ever inhe-
• rent in the people, but never to be resorted to, save at
the awful crisis when civil society is solved into its first
elements, declared themselves free and independent
States, and two days afterwards, in justification of that
act, issued this Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen
United States of America.

17

Ijv Congress, July 4, 1776.

The Una7iimous Declaration of the Thirteen United State's
of America.

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one
people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with
another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate
and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God en-
title them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that
they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident — that all men are created
equal ; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
rights ; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, de-
riving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that when-
ever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the
right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new govern-
ment, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers
in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and
happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate, that governments long es-
tablished should not be changed for light and transient causes ; and ac-
cordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to
suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing
the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of
abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a
design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is
their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for
their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these co-
lonies ; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter
their former systems of government. The history of the present king of
Great Britain, is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all hav-
ing in direct object the establisliment of an absolute tyranny over these
States. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary
for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and press-
ing importance, unless suspended in their operation, till his assent should
be obtained ; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend
to them. He has refused to jtass other laws for the accommodation of
large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right
of representation in the legislature — a right inestimable to them, and
formidable to tyrants only.

3

. ^ 18

Ke lias railed together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncorn-
foitable, and distant from the repository of their public records, for the
sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing, with
manly firmness, his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time after such dissolutions, to cause others
to be elected ; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihila-
tion, have returned to the people at large, for their exercise, the State
remaining, in the mean time, exposed to all the dangers- of invasion
from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevpnt the population of these States ; for that
purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners ; refusing to
pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions
of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent
to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of
their offices, and the amount and pa3'-ment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of
officers, to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the
consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the military independent of, and superior
to, the civil power.

He has combined with others to subj-ect us to a jurisdiction foreign tf>
our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to
their acts of pretended legislation :

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any mur-
ders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these States :
For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world :
For imposing taxes on us without our consent :
For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury :
For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offences :
For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring Pro-
vince, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging it»
boundaries, so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for
introducing the same absolute rule into these colonies ;

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws,
and altering, fundamentally, the forms of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves in-
vested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

19

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of liis protec-
tion, and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and
destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to
complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun
with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy, scarcely paralleled in the
most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized
nation.

H« has coifistrained our fellow-citizens, taken captive on the high seas,
to -bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their
friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endea-
vored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian
savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction
of all ages, sexes, and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in
the most humble terms : our repeated petitions have been answered only
by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every
act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We
have warned them, from time to time, of attempts by their legislature to
extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded
them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We
have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have
conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these
usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connexions and cor-
respondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of
consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity which
denounces our separation, and hold them as we hold the rest of man-
kind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America
in general congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the
world, for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in th« name and by the
.authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and de-
clare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and
independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the
British crown, and that all political connexion between them and the
State of Great Britain, is, and ought to be, totally dissolved ; and that
as free and independent States, they have full power to levy war, con-
clude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all othei-
acts and things which independent States may of right do. And for tl\e
gupport of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Dj-

20

vine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our for-
tunes, and our sacred honor.

JOHN HANCOCK.
Josiah Bartlett, John Witherspoon,

William Whipple, Francis Hopkinson,

Matthew Thornton. John Hart,

Abraham Clark.

Charles Carroll, of

Carrollton.

Samuel Adams,
John Adams,
Robert Treat Paine,
Elbridge Gerry.

Stephen Hopkins,
William Ellery.

Roger Sherman,
Samuel Huj:iting;toH,
William Williams,
Oliver Wolcott.

William Floyd,
Philip Livingston,
Francis Lewis,
Lewis Morris.

Richard Stockton,

Robert Morris,
Benjamin Rush,
Benjamin Franklin,
John Morton,
George Clymer,
James Smith,
George Taylor,
James Wilson,
George Ross.

Cesar Rodney,
George Read,
Thomas M'Kean.

Samuel Chase,
William Paca,
Thomas Stone,

George Wythe,
Richard Henry Lee,
Thomas Jefferson,
Benjamin Harrison,
Thomas Nelson, jun.
Francis Lightfoot Lee,.
Carter Braxton.

William Hooper,
Joseph Hewes,
John Penn,

Edward Rutledge,
Thomas Heyward,jr.
Thomas Lynch, jr.
Arthur Middleton.

Button Gwinnett,
Lyman Hall,
George Walton.

It is not, let me repeat, fellow-citizens, it is not the
long enumeration of intolerable wrongs concentrated in
this Declaration ; it is not the melancholy catalogue of
alternate oppression and entreaty, of reciprocated indig-
nity and remonstrance, upon which, in the celebration
of this anniversary, your memory delights to dwell. Nor
is it yet that the justice of your cause was vindicated by
the God of Battles ; that in a conflict of seven years, the
history of the war by which you maintained that Decla-
ration, became the history of the civilized world; that
the unanimous voice of enlightened Europe, and the
verdict of an after age, have sanctioned your assumption
of sovcreigu power ; and that the name of your Wash-
ington is enrolled upon the records of time, first ia
the glorious line of heroic virtue. It is not that the

21

monarch himself, who had been jour oppressor, was
compelled to recognise you as a sovereign and indepen-
dent people, and that the nation, whose feehngs of fra-
ternity for you had slumbered in the lap of pride, was
awakened in the arms of humiliation to your equal and
no longer contested rights. The primary purpose of
this Declaration, the proclamation to the world of the
causes of our Revolution, is " with the years beyond the
flood." It is of no more interest to us than the chastity of
Lucretia, or the apple on the head of tlie child of Tell.
Little less than forty years have revolved since the strug-
gle for independence was closed ; another generation
has arisen •, and, in the assembly of nations, our Republic
is already a matron of mature age. The cause of your
independence is no longer upon trial ; the final sentence
upon it has long been passed upon earth and ratified in
Heaven.

The interest, which in this paper has survived the oc-
casion upon which it was issued ; the interest which is
of every age and every clime ; the interest which quick-
ens with the lapse of years, spreads as it grows old, and
brightens as it recedes, is in the principles which it pro-
claims. It was the first solemn declaration by a nation
of the only legitimate foundation of civil government.
It was the corner stone of a new fabric, destined to co-
ver the surface of the globe. It demolished at a stroke
the lawfulness of all governments founded upon conquest.
It swept away all the rubbish of accumulated centuries
of servitude. It announced in practical form to the
world the transcendent truth of the unalienable sove-
reignty of the people. It proved that the social compact
was no figment of the imagination : but a real, solid, and
sacred bond of the social union. From the day of this
Declaration, the people of North America were no lon-
ger the fragment of a distant empire, imploring justice
and mercy from an inexorable master in another hemis-

22

phere. They were no longer children appealing in vairi
to the sympathies of a heartless mother ; no longer sub-
jects leaning upon the shattered columns of royal pro-
mises, and invoking the faith of parchment to secure
their rights. They were a natiori, asserting as of right,
and maintaining by war, its own existence. A nation
was born in a day —

" How many ages hence
" Shall this, their lofty scene, be acted o'er
" In states unborn, and accents yet unknown ?"

It will be acted o'er, fellow-citizens, but it can never
he repeated. It stands, and must for ever stand, alone, a
beacon on the summit of the mountain, to which all the
inhabitants of the earth may turn their eyes for a genial
and saving light till time shall be lost in eternity, and this
globe itself dissolve, nor leave a wreck behind. It stands
for ever, a light of admonition to the rulers of men, a light
of salvation and redemption to the oppressed. So long
as this planet shall be inhabited by human beings, so long
as man shall be of social nature, so long as government
shall be necessary to the great moral purposes of socie-
ty, and so long as it shall be abused to the purposes of
oppression, so long shall this Declaration hold out to the
sovereign and to the subject the extent and the bounda-
ries of their respective rights and duties, founded in the
laws of nature, and of nature's God. Five and forty
years have passed away since this Declaration was issu-
ed by our fathers ; and here are we, fellow-citizens, as-
sembled in the full enjoyment of its fruits, to bless the
author of our being for the bounties of his providence, in
casting our lot in this favored land ; to remember with
effusions of gratitude the sages who put forth, and the
heroes who bled for the estabhshmentof this Declaration;
and, by the communion of soul in the reperusal and hear-
ing of this instrument, to renew the genuine Holy Alli-
ance of its principles, to recognise them as eternal truths.

23

and to pledge ourselves, and bind our posterity, to a faith-
ful and undeviating adherence to them.

Fellow-Citizens, our fathers have been faithful to them
before us. When the little band of their Delegates, " with
a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence,
for the support of this declaration, mutually pledged to
each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred
honor,'''' from every dwelling, street, and square, of your
populous cities, it was re-echoed with shouts of joy and
gratulation ! And if the silent language of the heart could
have been heard, every hill upon the surface of this con-
tinent which had been trodden by the foot of civilized
man^ every valley in which the toil of your fathers had
opened a paradise upon the wild, would have rung, with
one accordant voice, louder than the thunders, sweeter
than the harmonies of the heavens, with the solemn and
responsive words, " We swear.'^''

The pledge has been redeemed. Through six years of
devastating but heroic war, through forty years of more
heroic peace, the principles of this declaration have been
supported by the toils, by the vigils, by the blood of your
fathers, and of j^ourselves. The conflict of war had be-
gun with fearful odds of apparent human power on the
part of the oppressor. He wielded at will the collective
force of the mightiest nation in Europe. He with mor6
than poetic truth asserted the dominion of the waves.
The pov.^er to whose unjust usurpation your fathers hurled
tlie gauntlet of defiance, batEed and vanquished by them,,
has even since, stripped of all the energies of this con-
tinent, been found adequate to give the law to its own
quarter of the globe, and to mould the destinies of the
European world. It was with a sling and a stone, that
your fathers went forth to encounter the massive vigor
of this Goliah. They slung the heaven-directed stone,
and

'^ With heaviest sound, the giant monster fell."

24

Amid the shouts of victory, your cause soon found
friends and alHes in the rivals of your enemies. France
recofijnised your Independence as existing in fact, and
made common cause with you for its support. Spain and
the Netherlands, without adopting your principles, suc-
cessively flung their weight into your scale. The Se-
miramis of the North, no convert to your doctrines, still
conjured all the maritime neutrality of Europe in array
against the usurpations of your antagonist upon the seas.
While some of the fairest of your fields were ravaged ;
while your towns and villages were consumed with fire ;
while the harvests of your summers were blasted ; while
the purity of virgin innocence, and the chastity of ma-
tronl}' virtue, were violated; while the living remnants of
the field of battle were reserved for the gibbet, by the
fraternal sympathies of Britons throughout your land, the
waters of the Atlantic ocean, and those that wash the
shores of either India, were dyed with the mingled blood
of combatants in the cause of ^orth American Indepen-
dence.

In the progress of time, that vial of wrath was exhaust-
ed. After seven years of exploits and achievements like
these, performed under the orders of the British king ;
to use the language of the treaty of peace, " it having
pleased the Divine Providence to dispose the hearts of
the most serene and most potent Prince, George the III,
by the Grace of God, King of Great Britain, France, and
Ireland, Defender of the Faith, Duke of Brunswick and
Luneburg, Arch Treasurer and Prince Elector of the
Holy Roman Empire, and so forth — and of the United
States of America to" — what ? " To forget all past mis-
understandings and differences that have unhappily inter-
rupted the good correspondence and friendship which
they 'nutu'aily wish to restore" — what then? Why —
"His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United

25

States, viz : New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode
Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New-
York, New-Jersey, Penu?ylvania, Delaware, Maryland,
Virginia, North-Carohna, South-Carolina, and Georgia,
to be Free, Sovereign, and Independent States ; that he
treats with them as such ; and for himself, his heirs, and
successors, relinquishes all claims to the Government,
proprietary and territorial rights of the same, and every
part thereof."

Fellow-Citizens, I am not without apprehension that
some parts of this extract, cited to the word and to the
letter, from the treaty of peace of 1783, may have dis-
composed the serenity of your temper. Far be it from
me, to dispose your hearts to a levity unbecoming the
hallowed dignity of this day. But this treaty of peace
is the dissert appropriate to the sumptuous banquet of the
Declaration. It is the epilogue to that unparalleled drama
of which the Declaration is the prologue. Observe, mj
countrymen and friends, how the rules of unity, pre-
scribed by the great masters of the tictive stage, were
preserved in this tragedy of pity and terror in real life.
Here was a beginning, a middle, and an end, of one
mighty action. The beginning was the Declaration which
we have read : the middle, was that sanguinary, calami-
tous, but glorious war, which calls for deeper colors, and
a brighter pencil, than mine to pourtray : the end was
the disposal by Divine Providence, that same Divine
Providence upon whose protection your fathers had so
solemnly and so effectually declared their firm reliance,
of the heart of the most serene and most potent prince
to acknowledge your Independence to the precise extent
in which it had been declared. Here was no great char-
ter of Runny Mead, yielded and accepted as a grant of
royal bounty. That which the Declaration had asserted^

4

26

which seven years of mercy-harrowing war had contest-
ed, was here, in express and unequivocal terms-, ac-
knozoledged. And how ? By the mere disposal of the
heart of tbc most serene and most potent prince.

The Declaration of Independence pronounced the
irrevocable decree of political separation, between the
United States and their People on the one part, and the
British King, Government and Nation on the other. It
proclaimed the first principles on which civil government
, is founded, and derived from them the justification be-
fore Earth and Heaven, of this act of sovereignty : but
it left the people of this Union collective and individual
w^ithout org-anijec^ Government. In contemplating this
state of things, one of the profoundest of British states-
men, in an ecstacy of astonishment, exclaimed " Anar-
chy is found tolerable !" But there was no diarchy.
From the day of the Declaration, the people of the
North American Union and of its constituent States,
were associated bodies of civilized men and christians, in
a state of nature ; but not of Anarchy. They were
bound by the laws of God, which they all, and by the
laws of the Gospel, which they nearly all, acknowledged
as the rules of their conduct. They were bound by all
those tender aud endearing sympathies, the absence of
which in the British Government and Nation towards
them was the primary cause of the distressing conflict
into which they had been precipitated. They were
bound by all the beneficent laws and institutions which
their foreAithers had brought with them from their mo-
ther Country, not as servitudes, but as rights. They
were bound by liabits of hardy industry, by frugal and
hospitable manners, by the general sentiments of social
equality, by pure and virtuous morals, and lastly they
were bound by the grappling hooks of common suffering
under the scourge of oppression. Where then, among

27

such a people, were the materials for Anarchy ? Had
there been among them no other Law, they would have
been a law unto themselves.

They had before them in their new position, besides
the maintenance of the Independence which they had
declared, three great objects to attain : the first, to ce-
ment and prepare for perpetuity, their common union,
and that of their Posterity ; the second,' to erect and or-
ganize civil and municipal Governments in their res-
pective States ; and the third, to form connexions of
friendship and of commerce with foreign Nations. For
all these objects, the same Congress which issued the
Declaration, and at the same time with it, had provided.
They recommended to the several States to form civil
governments for themselves. With guarded and cau-
tious deliberation they matured a confederation for the
whole Union ; and they prepared treaties of commerce,
to be offered to the principal maritime nations of the
world. All these objects were in a great degree ac-
complished, amid the din of arms, and while every quar-
ter of our country was ransacked by the fury of invasion.
The states organized their governments, all in republi-
can forms ; all on the principles of the Declaration. The
confederation was unanimously adopted by the thirteen
States, and treaties of commerce were concluded with
France and the Netherlands, in which, for the first time,
the same just and magnanimous principles, consigned in
the Declaration of Independence, were, so far as they
could be applicable to the intercourse between nation
and nation, solemnly recognised.

When experience had proved that the Confederation
was not adequate to the national purposes of the country,
the people of the United States, without tumult, with-
out violence, by their delegates, all chosen upon princi-
ples of equal right, formed a more {serfect Uriion, by the
establishment of the Federal Constitution. Tliis has al-

/

28

ready passed the ordeal of one human generation. In
all the changes of men and of parties through which it
has passed, it has been administered on the same funda-
mental principles. Our manners, our habits, our feel-
ings, are all republican ; and if our principles had been,
when first proclaimed, doubtful to the ear of reason or
the sense of humanity, they would have been reconciled
to our understandings, and endeared to our hearts by their
practical operation. In the progress of forty years since
the acknowledgement of our Independence, we have gone
through many modifications of internal government, and
through all the vicissitudes of peace and war, with other
powerful nations. But never, never for a moment have
the great principles, consecrated by the Declaration of
this day, been renounced or abandoned.

And now, friends and countrymen, if the wise and
learned philosophers of the elder world ; the first ob-
servers of nutation and aberration, the discoverers of
maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of
Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells, should find their
hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for
the benefit of mankind ? Let our answer be this : Ameri-
ca, with the same voice which spoke herself into exist-
enceasa nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguish-
able rights of human nature, and the only lavt^ful founda-
tions of government. America, in the assembly of na-
tions, since her admission among them, has invariably,
though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of
honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous re-
ciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them,
though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears,
the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of
equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a cen-
tury, without a single exception, respected the indepen-
dence of other nations while asserting and maintaining

29

her own. She has abstained from interference in the
concerns of others, even when the conflict has been for
principles to which she chngs, as to the last vital drop
that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for
centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the
European world, will be contests of inveterate power,
and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom
and Independence, has been or shall be unfurled, there
will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But
she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.
She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence
of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her
own. She will recommend the general cause by the
countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy
tef her example. She well knows that by once enlisting
under other banners than her own, were they even the
banners of foreign Independence, she would involve
herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars
of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and
ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the stand-
ard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her poli-
cy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The
irontlet upon her brow would no longer beam with the
ineffable splendor of Freedom and Independence ; but
in its stead would soon be substituted an Imperial Dia-^
dem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky ra-
diance of dominion and power. She might become the
dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the
ruler of her own spirit.

Stand forth, ye champions of Britannia, ruler of the
waves ! Stand forth, ye chivalrous knights of chartered
liberties and the rotten borough ! Enter the lists, ye
boasters of inventive genius ! Ye mighty masters of the
palette and the brush ! Ye improvers upon the sculpture
of the Elgin marbles ! Ye spawners of fustian romance

30

and lascivious lyrics ! Come and enquire what has Ame-
rica done for the benefit of mankind ! In the half cen-
tury which has elapsed since the Declaration of Ameri-
can Independence, what have you done for the benefit
of mankind ?

When Themistocles was sarcastically asked by some
great musical genius of his age, whether he knew how
to play upon the lute, he answered. No ! but he knew
how to make a great city of a small one. We shall not
contend with you for the prize of music, painting, or
sculpture. We shall not disturb the extatic trances of
your Chemists, nor call from the heavens the ardent
gaze of your Astronomers. We will not ask you who
was the last President of your Royal Academy. We
will not enquire by whose mechanical combinations it
was, that your Steam-Boats stem the currents of your
rivers, and vanquish the opposition of the winds them-
selves upon your seas. We will not name the inventor
of the Cotton-Gin, for we fear that you would ask us
the meaning of the word, and pronounce it a provincial
barbarism. We will not name to you him, whose graver
defies the imitation of forgery, and saves the labor of
your executioner, by taking from your greatest geniuses
of robbery the power of committing the crime. He is
now among yourselves : and since your philosophers
have permitted him to prove to them the compressibility
of water, you may perhaps claim him for your own.
Would you soar to fame upon a rocket, or burst into
glory from a shell ? we shall leave you to enquire of
your naval heroes their opinion of the Steam Battery
and the Torpedo. It is not by the contrivance of agents
of destruction, that America wishes to commend her in-
ventive genius to the admiration or the gratitude of after
times* nor is it even in the detection of the secrets, or
the composition of new modifications of physical nature.
"Exciidcnt alii spirantia mollius Kra."

Nor even is her purpose the glory of Roman ambition ;
nor " Tu regere Imperio populos" — her memento to her
sons. Her glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march
is the march of mind. She has a spear and a shield ;
but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence,
Peace. This has been her Declaration : this has been,
as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of man-
kind would permit, her practice.

My Countrymen, Fellow-Citizens, and Friends, could
that spirit which dictated the Declaration we have this
day read ; that spirit, which " prefers before all temples
the upright heart and pure," at this moment descend
from his habitation in the skies, and within this Hall, in
language audible to mortal ears, address each one of us
here assembled, our beloved Country, Britannia ruler
of the waves, and every individual among the sceptred
lords of human kind ; his words would be

GO THOU, AND DO LIKEWISE.

DAVIS AlfD FORCE, PRISTERS,

MAK ^ W34